Abstract

The magneto-caloric effect (MCE) is a possible route to more efficient heating and cooling of residential and commercial buildings. The search for improved materials is important to the development of a viable MCE based heat pump technology. We have calculated the magnetic structure of a candidate MCE material:. The density of magnetic states was calculated with the Wang Landau statistical method utilizing energies fit to those of the locally self-consistent multiple scattering method. The relationships between the density of magnetic states and the field induced adiabatic temperature change and the isothermal entropy change are discussed.

Received 04 October 2010Accepted 08 December 2010Published online 14 April 2011

Acknowledgments:

Work performed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, sponsored by the Laboratory Directed Research and Development Program (ORNL), by the Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Division; Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, and by the Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering; Office of Basic Energy Sciences (US DOE).